Guiliani and 9/11

I disagree with a few points on Phil Nugent's otherwise excellent post about Guiliani's popularity waning. Rudy's popularity didn't come to a "crashing halt" when he suggested that we could push those petty mayoral elections back a bit. He was ignored, and there were procedural reasons why he couldn't have done it, but the press still lionized him, and he still was the Churchill of 9/11 to everyone, myself included. I'll continue to credit him with keeping the city and possibly the country from descending into chaos that day. My guess he would have won that initiative if it was up to a popular vote.

And even though Bloomberg opposed delaying the elections, he still plastered the airways with ad after ad toting a suddenly very valuable endorsement from the mayor. since everyone was glued to their set watching either 9/11 coverage or the World Series, Bloomberg had a great captive audience and basically a monopoly on the airwaves. And Green, after screwing up everything else, decided to go nasty against Bloomberg about the allegations of harassing staff members to get abortions, and it backfired massively.

Still with all that (and I'm not even going into Ferrer), Bloomberg won a squeaker of 2% and was treated as an accidental mayor. That's certainly how I viewed him until the power outage, when his calm, dull, bureaucratic voice was just what the city needed.

It's easy to lump Guiliani in with Bush in retrospect, but the bloom really didn't come off the rose until the Kerik nomination and he continued to poll very highly until he actually started running. And even before 9/11, he was the guy who brought the crime rate down lower than the national average. A lot of people were wondering if it would shoot back up once he went away. There was a feeling that the city needed to be ruled by a belligerent semi-tyrant, having memories of nice-guy David Dinkins not keeping the peace. Liberals who were not at the wrong end of police brutality comforted themselves with the fact that he was socially liberal on issues from abortion to welfare reform, in some cases to the left of the Clinton administration.

I may have forgotten some things or gotten them wrong. I moved to New York only a year before Phil, so I wasn't actually in town for most of the Guiliani years. This spawned out of an email I wrote Phil last night, which he asked if he could post, but I decided to use this to see if I'd restart blogging. I'll probably move to Tumblr or something, since most of my insights aren't really worth a full post.